splendid banner was made, consisting of a cross-staff, from which, embroidered in jewels on a silken square, hung the sacred monogram; and under this standard, the labarum, the army marched to victory.

From this time Christianity was not only tolerated, but placed under imperial protection; crucifixion, moreover, ceased to be employed as a form of punishment, and the Cross began to be treated with honour. A cross of gold, adorned with precious stones, was placed, by Constantine’s orders, in the chief hall of the palace; and the imperial coinage is found to bear, with increasing frequency, the holy sign. Sometimes, as in a coin of Constantius II., the Emperor is depicted holding the labarum in his hand, or, as on those of Jovianus, he carries a globe surmounted by a cross; while later emperors stamped their coinage with the cross itself, often surrounded by a laurel crown.

The fear of insult to sacred places and religious emblems being thus removed, the Christians began to build themselves churches more worthy of their holy rites than the rooms or the catacombs with which they had formerly been compelled to be content, and in the decoration of these the cross began to take its appropriate place. A couple of centuries later, in the reign of Justinian (527-565), it was even ordered that every church should have a cross surmounting it.

Closely connected with the conversion of Constantine is the alleged discovery of the true Cross by S. Helena.

It was in the year 325, the year of the first General Council of the Church, which met at Nicaea to condemn the heresy of Arius, that the Empress, endowed with ample means and with the fullest authority, went to Jerusalem and began the search for the instrument of our redemption. The site of the Crucifixion having been preserved in tradition, excavations were made on the spot, which first disclosed the Holy Sepulchre, over which, both to conceal and to desecrate the spot, a temple had been erected to Venus; and afterwards was brought to light, in a pit hard by, those venerable pieces of wood which Christendom hailed as “the very Cross,” to one of which was still affixed a board with an inscription in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.

To determine the exact value of the story thus briefly summarized, is not so easy a matter as many have assumed it to be. On the one hand, no one questions the sincerity of Helena herself, nor the fact that she actually did find the wood in the excavations which she had made. S. Cyril of Jerusalem, writing from that spot no more than twenty years later, refers to the event, and most of the fathers and chroniclers of the Church who follow him notice it, both he and they evidently accepting as facts the claims made on behalf of the wood. Moreover, it is not without its bearing on the matter that the date of the discovery coincides with a great crisis in the Arian controversy, when the eagerness of the heretics to attack and discredit the Catholics in any and every way would present a special difficulty to any attempt to pass off a fraud upon Christendom. And, finally, it is not easy to see who could plan and carry out so vast a deception in the face of all the persons of authority both in Church and State, who were then in Jerusalem; nor the object which the deception would be intended to attain. The great argument on the other side, and one difficult to overcome, and impossible to ignore, is the silence of Eusebius on the subject; yet he was present in Jerusalem at the actual time of the discovery, or very shortly afterwards, and in his life of Constantine he records others of the works undertaken in the Holy City by that Emperor through his mother, such as the erection of the church of the Holy Sepulchre. It is impossible but that Eusebius knew of the assertion with which Jerusalem and the world rang, that the wood discovered was the true Cross, yet he makes no allusion to it.

Whatever conclusion we moderns may come to on the matter, it is beyond question that all Christendom at that time accepted the story as true, and greeted the sacred wood with unbounded enthusiasm; and the devotion thus excited cannot fail to have had a marked influence on the use of the figure of the Cross.

A new chapter in the development of this use is begun at the Crusades, and to these the subsequent history of this world-famed wood naturally leads us.

The greater portion of “the true Cross” was kept at Jerusalem, in the church reared by Constantine, and dedicated with great solemnity in 335. It was in time richly adorned with gold and jewels, and was exposed for the veneration of the faithful every Easter Sunday. Nearly three centuries later, in 614, Chosroes, King of Persia, after victorious campaigns in Asia Minor and in Egypt, descended on the Holy Land with a tumultuous host of barbarians. The City of Jerusalem was taken and sacked, after ninety thousand Christians had fallen fighting in its defence; and the Cross was carried off in triumph by the heathen conqueror.

So bold an assault both on the Faith and on the Empire could not be brooked, and in 629, at a great battle on the plains of Nineveh, the Persian power was destroyed by the Emperor Heraclius, and the Cross recovered. With all solemnity the sacred relic was borne back to its former resting place, the Emperor himself, bare of head and foot, carrying it on his shoulders into the city.

Again was Jerusalem captured in 637, now by the newborn Mohammedan power, but the Cross was not molested, and for four hundred years it was the object of Christendom’s special devotion, pilgrims from every country in Europe, and of all grades of society, coming in countless numbers to kneel before it, and in many cases to die within reach of it. But in the year 1009, a Caliph of Egypt arose, in the person of El Hakim, to whose fierce and fanatical spirit the toleration hitherto granted to the Christians was hateful, and in the name of the prophet he invaded Palestine and took Jerusalem. The churches built by Constantine and Helena over the sacred sites were utterly destroyed, and the Cross barely escaped the same fate; faithful bands, however, succeeded in carrying it off and concealing it, and for almost a century it was but rarely and cautiously exhibited.

At last the trumpet call of Peter the Hermit rang out across Europe, and an army, full of enthusiasm, and led by a band of almost ideal heroes, started up in answer. Whatever faults marred the actions of the Crusaders, and however soiled by human ambitions and personal jealousies later expeditions might be, the first Crusade was inspired by a genuine zeal for a cause that all held to be holy—the rescuing of the places sanctified by the Saviour’s life and death from the pollution of unbelievers, and especially the bringing back of the Cross to its place of honour. On Friday, July 13th, 1099, the Christian armies entered the city, and the Cross, uplifted on Calvary, became the centre, almost the raison d’étre, of the new kingdom of Jerusalem.

But the time of its disappearance from the earth was not far distant. Godfrey, the first king of that almost mystic kingdom, was buried beside it on the right, and Baldwin, his successor, on the left, and the guardianship of the holy places had fallen into hands less conscious of the sacredness of their office, when Saladin invaded the land in 1187. The last stand of the Christians, under Guy, the unworthy successor of the early kings, was made at Hattin, and the sacred wood of the Cross itself was borne into the camp to inspire them with courage and devotion; but the spirit of the old Crusaders was dead, and the infidel was completely triumphant.

A few years later, in 1192, we hear of the Cross as still in Saladin’s possession, and as shewn by his